Category: Tools for Managers and Leaders
Pizza, Perfection and Good Enough
My husband and I had dinner at our friend Jeff’s house the other night. He’s a talented engineer and wanted us to come and see the progress he’s made on the house he has reinvented and is rebuilding. The house is looking great and he’s focus on detail is beautiful. But what I found most [Read More...]
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Prize Power: Breakthrough innovations for your company
I sat dumbfounded in an audience the other night as I listened to X Prize Founder and Chairman Peter Diamandas evangelize about the power of marrying compelling goals to significant dollar prizes to catalyze innovative solutions for big, thorny problems. The freshness and success of his approach to tackling some of the enormous challenges of [Read More...]
View PostLet Me Entertain You
What makes a presentation a compelling, edge of your seat, tell everyone you know what you just experienced event? Here’s a clue– it is definitely NOT data filled power point slides– those are particularly handy if you’re looking to induce sleep or give folks time to catch up on their emails. So many of my [Read More...]
Digging For Worms
I have been re-reading Jim Collins’ wonderful book Good To Great about what enables some companies to consistently outperform their competitors and develop into great organizations. He’s got a number of compelling insights into leadership and strategy—I heartily recommend the book, but I was particularly taken with the chapter on confronting hard, unpleasant truths. It [Read More...]
Evaluating the Annual Eval
For most people, the ritual of the annual employee evaluation is about as much fun as a sharp stick in the eye. Evaluations are enormously time consuming, fraught with worry and concern on both sides of the desk, and loaded with implication for salary, benefits and promotion. So why do we do them? The purpose, [Read More...]
Spheres of Influence
We squander a lot of our energy and create heaps of useless anxiety worrying over issues that are either out of our control or of incidental or irrelevant impact to our lives. It appears to be endemic to most of us to fret, meddle, angst and kvetch even when there is absolutely nothing to gain [Read More...]
Accentuate the Positive
Remember this song—written by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen – I’d sing it for you if I could but you are spared that joy by the limitations of the printed word! You’ve got to accentuate the positive Eliminate the negative Latch on to the affirmative Don’t mess with Mister In-Between You’ve got to spread joy [Read More...]
The Fireman’s Lament
Though our job descriptions say otherwise, most of us have grown up to be professional fire fighters. We wrestle urgent problems to the ground, jump when the phone rings, focus on the crisis de jour and often forget to step back and assess whether we are spending our time intelligently. Exploring the distinction between what [Read More...]
Teeter Totter – Cultivating Resilience
Working as an executive coach in organizations that are fast paced and often very hard driving, one of the goals I have for all my clients (and myself!) is increased speed in recovering balance. How quickly can we come back to center when we’ve been knocked off? This is a critical skill to develop because [Read More...]
Post Mortems
One of the most effective ways to distill the learning from a completed project is to conduct a structured post-mortem review. Way too often project managers fail to harness the group’s energy, knowledge, best ideas and smartest fixes before the group has moved on to the next project. This omission can be incalculably expensive. Taking [Read More...]
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